Dart’s sassy letter begins with “If I ever again become cheerful when I speak of this ship, don’t believe a word of it. Since I’ve already wasted a thousand or more words in previous letters telling you how hopelessly fouled up this ship is, I’ll not go further into the subject. If I cussed in front of you, I’d surely cuss now.”
Today brought a nice long letter from Dot, one from Mr. Hal Martin saying that Mr. Ira Cotton was also a civilian now. He also got a note from a Cleveland friend, Bob Cunningham, and a letter from Pop enclosing 8 snapshots Dart took in Charleston. There’s a second set of those pictures ion Cleveland, so Dot can have a look at them when she visits his folks.
He met another Case man today, an Ensign from a neighboring ship. There are enough V-12 guys around here to have a reunion. Dart is the only one who is unmarried and not commissioned.
He continued the letter after serving a 0400 to 0800 watch with Blevins and a new Officer of the Day. “He didn’t know beans from bananas, so Blevins and I ran the ship. We had more fun.” The watch was so busy that when it ended, they were still trying to tell the same story as when they started. He’s happy they were able to teach the new officer the way things should be done.
From everything he’s learned from tapping his inside sources, the Craig will be leaving port on January 19th. He hopes he can be back (out) in time for her spring break, but Easter is a more likely scenario.
In response to her letter, he thinks that little pamphlet she read on the train sums up his feelings pretty well. Some of those little USO pieces pack a lot of meat. He’s glad she liked those particular opening and closing sentences to his recent letters, and he wishes he could think up things like that more often. He can’t recall the exact words of her opening paragraph in her Christmas Day letter, but it had something to do with sleeping in his arms. “I think our immediate aim is the same; you want to get married, and I’m trying to find a way, ’cause I want to, too.”
# # #
Dot feels like teasing Dart a little in her first paragraph: “Got a letter from you today that was over a year old. It was dated January 6, 1945. Yesterday the same thing happened. What shall we do with this mail business? Or could it be that you have forgotten we have just entered into a new year, 1946? How can you expect June 1947 to get her if you persist in calling this 1945?”
She was so impatient to learn what her first semester grades were that she went to the Registrar’s office today. They were holding her grades until they heard what she got in her education class. It’s a good thing she went, because she didn’t take any education classes! Meanwhile, she learned the results of her other courses, and she was very disappointed. Every grade she got was a letter lower than she’d expected, except her two science classes, in which she received the expected C. If she works very hard and stops “wasting time,” she hopes to bring each grade up a letter this time around.
She reports that Physical Science has caught her interest this week. They’re studying levers, the pulley and the incline plane. For a girl as mechanical as Dot is, these topics come easily to her.
Her new gym class is modern dance. “Oh, and to think I thought tap was bad! This is absolutely the height of ridiculous. We have to wear insipid looking tights and walk and leap around the gym in our bare feet in time to the music. We’re supposed to walk as though ‘we’re glad to be alive,’ but after doing the exercises we’re put through, we wake up the next morning wishing we were dead.”
There’s a big formal dance on January 18, but the guy she’s interested in is going on a little boat trip around then, so she won’t be going. The girls are trying to get Ellie fixed up with a date, but whenever Dot approaches a guy to ask if he’s going to the dance, he thinks she’s asking him to go and he runs in the other direction.
Turning now to his recent letter, she writes “No, Dart, I never thought, even when you told me your feelings, that you had an abnormal interest in sex. I think the ones who can’t keep their interest under control are the ones who are abnormal. They’re surely much weaker than you and there are very few others like you. And that brings us to the question of why I asked you how you could be so wonderful. I meant how could you refrain from doing what you know is wrong and yet that which had such strong hold on us both? True, if you had tried anything, I would, I think, have put a stop to it, but the fact that you didn’t try anything means so much more. That’s why you’re so wonderful.”
“Please don’t fret about how we will entertain in the future. If people don’t like not drinking when they come to our house, let them bring their own liquor. It’s been done before. Besides, if people don’t come to our house, think how much more we can be alone together.”
She hopes he wouldn’t dare tell his mother what Dot wrote about staying up late. When Mrs. P. tells her some of the things Dart writes home about Dot, she blushes something awful. She hopes Dart will have a little discretion in what he shares with his folks, thereby sparing her some of the blushing.
It’s more than she could hope for that he and his parents could drive her home in June, but she’ll hope, nonetheless. She also hopes he begins to get some mail soon. She knows she’s missed writing a couple of days, but something should be getting through to him.
How she hopes the next three months will go as fast as the last three have. She misses him, even though she knows he’s with her in spirit. “But I want more than that. I want the real you.”